A woman’s yearning is a zigzaging, chevron patterned perseverance toward the heart. The heart is an empty house at 2101 Vessel Street. The weaker vessel holds the gold as it cools, fusing with the shine. A woman’s desire is expensive. It will cost her the old linen song in her heart. Curtains cover windows to avenues of guilt.  I walk into the prehaunted house, see my ancestors stitching samplers for Envy, who wears black sequins and little else. What temperature is your temperament?

In the feral rivers, fish dream of scuba diving in air, floating past our windows and admiring our most habitual habitats. In aquatic versions of The Odyssey, Odysseus’s dog doesn’t recognize him, sniffs another man’s sandals. Beastly, violent beauty paints the terrain with rain. I spill sparkling water on my dress, and a red stain flows out from my interested breasts. What commands womanhood but hazy procreation? Water wipes away our past, stitches a sordid future. Through the bloody koolaid, my nipples peak at decency like voyeurs.

A righteous ridge of anger winds through the plains of plastic feeling. Rage is a red, hard thing. I throw my name at it and my name slides off. Rage has a grip on reality much like it does on softening butter. Certainty evaporates here, and questions rain down. My body is poised for questions but not for this poison, this vial of unforgiveness with a homemade label slapped on it that says “feral righteousness.”  If you follow the ridge, Regret will plunge you into the sea, a millstone around your neck for every child you never had.

Floating in the flotsam of disco debris, I lay my back over the surface of life like a blanket. I will float here until I drown, counting the pennies children have thrown into this pool while their mothers gild the pansies. Eternal life floats just beyond the permeable boundary of our haphazard existences.  Gossiping in tongues about the glitter coalescing into a disco ball in the shallow end, I betray my inner glitz. My name is Temporary. My name blew away in a typhoon. My name is Fictional. My name parties on boats and falls overboard drunk. Sinking feelings sidle up to me, pressing down on my core.

Along the Appian Way of my heart, ruthlessness sold by the bucket. Striding along some gray corridor, a robot hell bent on installing Christmas.exe on the server of my mind. Here in the heat that shimmies seductively for all to see, I focus my eyes on the little girl in the purple dress with the red lollipop, minding her business like it was paint drying. She huddles inside my name at night when the cold comes.

Your participation in this fun survey is mandatory. What color were the marbles you lost? Loss is a chainsaw convulsing in a mosh pit. Did you see your lover undress you with his eyes, his lashes gently willing your smocking dress down off your shoulders? Grief is a byproduct of death, and like all byproducts, corporate America can sell it to your children for nourishment. Do you see the orb eyed children drooling over processed abandonment? Submit your answers. Submit your name.

Schools of saints in cream robes dripping with incense flavored chant swim through the collective psyche. On the boat above the water, Jesus and Peter fishing. Below the seal of unsliceable surface, me singing to an ocean liner full of dead partiers. Hunting herds of razor sharp HR managers comb the water for verbal malfeasance. I want to tend nurseries of consonants. Instead, I bewitch a ghost in his last century’s best, who tells me I’m the best woman he’s never had.

Stale lightning works its way through my daily bread like fungal rhysomes. In the valley between my breasts, supine visions of cotton candy carnivals. Here in the molten core of ourselves, we can be absolved of our eccentricities in this solar system of sameness, revolving as it does around boiling coinage. Soon our daily water will grow up to be rain. It will fall into the sea, laughing.

Dancing sprites jitter alongside Death as he sweeps the purple plain with his discount scythe. From whom much is given, much will be extracted. The vineyards are choking on weeds taller than me. In the wine press, remnants of what were once promises, pulpy and thin. In my housework dress of cozy, comfy, suburban glamor, sleek thoughts of collecting glasses. The sprite looms over the landscape of life like a giant, pulsating windmill. Death is rational, is weighing his options, is looking at me.